Page 1198 – Christianity Today (2024)

The story of Jesus has become so familiar to us that we sometimes fail to grasp just how shocking, disturbing, or ultimately motivating it really is. Even films designed to take us back to 1st-century Judea tend to come across as soothing or reassuring, which hardly matches how the apostles would have experienced those events. Sometimes it takes a radical reimagining to get us to really think about the implications of that story, and how it might be applied to our present-day reality. And one of the most interesting such reimaginings—certainly in recent years—is Son of Man, a South African production that depicts Jesus as a political activist working in a war-torn modern African country.

Like most independent foreign films, Son of Man has kept a relatively low profile—it didn't even come out on DVD on this continent until four years after it premiered at the Sundance festival in 2006—but it can now be streamed on Netflix in the U.S., and it has attracted a fair bit of attention in some circles. The conversation surrounding the film is now further illuminated by Son of Man: An African Jesus Film, a collection of 16 essays that look at the film within the contexts of African culture and the Jesus-film tradition as a whole.

Edited by Richard Walsh, Jeffrey L. Staley, and Adele Reinhartz, all of whom have written on Bible films in the past, the book illuminates such details as the way the film mixes the biblical baptism and temptation of Jesus with Xhosa circumcision rituals, or the way the Jesus of this film is much more interested in political activism than theology, or the way the film makes Mary a far more prominent figure than she is in other Jesus films, because it is she who compels her son to bear witness to the atrocities around them when he is still a boy, and it is she, rather than any of the disciples, who plays the primary role in shaping his community after he dies, by leading his followers in a song of protest.

Interestingly, in fusing the biblical narrative and the African setting, the film sometimes ends up straying from the realities of both. This is perhaps most evident in the film's treatment of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. In the film, Jesus is not executed in public but killed privately by the authorities, and it is his mother who exhumes his body and hangs it from a cross to expose what the authorities have done. The "crucifixion" thus becomes a kind of "resurrection," since it is the display of his body that motivates his mother and his followers to continue as a community that confronts the authorities. But if this sequence takes liberties with the Bible, it also takes liberties with African social norms; as Jeremy Punt notes in his essay, the mother's action here "opposes the African custom of honouring the dead."

Perhaps the most interesting essays in this book are those that surprise the most. I was not expecting to see, for example, an essay by Staley comparing and contrasting Son of Man with the 1973 hippie musical Godspell, but the points of contact between the two films are fascinating, once you notice them. Among other things, both films make significant use of songs, and they both feature disciples of both genders, a Jesus whose face is painted at least some of the time, and red ribbons symbolizing blood when Jesus is "crucified." On the other hand, where Godspell emphasizes the parables but leaves out the miracles, Son of Man depicts the miracles but leaves out the parables; and where Godspell imagines that one can react to the problems of this life by retreating into a world of childlike play, Son of Man is all about confronting the powers of this world and working toward social change.

Similarly, the very first essay in the book—by Gerald West, a biblical hermeneutics teacher at the University of KwaZulu-Natal—summarizes the reactions of West's students to a screening of Son of Man. Unlike many North Americans, who have immediately praised the film for its social relevance, West reports that his students wondered at times if the film was contributing to an "Afro-pessimist" caricature of their continent, not least by the way it mixes South African political concerns with images of violence taken from the conflicts in Rwanda and other countries. West also notes how the film allows the biblical narrative to trump African political realities at times: for example, the terrorists in the film kill the children they find, just like Herod's soldiers in the Bible, but in reality they would have drafted the boys into their armies as child-soldiers. Similarly, the story of the adulteress who was about to be stoned to death is here turned into a story about an adulteress who is about to be "necklaced," i.e., burned to death with a gasoline-filled tire placed around her neck—but in the real world, "necklacing" was reserved for those accused of political collaboration.

I was also intrigued by an essay by Darren J. N. Middleton and S. Brent Plate that looks at Son of Man in the context of other films that have deviated from the standard filmic interpretation of Jesus, in which he is seemingly always played by someone of European descent.[1] Among other things, the authors cover films like Jesus, the Spirit of God and Karunamayudu—which were made in Iran and India, respectively, and which naturally reflect the beliefs and stylistic norms of the cultures in which they were made—as well as The Color of the Cross, an American film that supposes the historical Jesus was black.

The book is not as accessible as it could have been. Several of the essays trade in the sort of impenetrable academic jargon that could be off-putting to readers who are otherwise interested in learning more about this film, and a few make gratuitously strident claims that perpetuate stereotypes of their own, as when George Aichele begins his otherwise interesting essay on the relationship between the transmission and betrayal of tradition (transmission and betrayal having the same root in Greek) by asserting that Son of Man will be offensive to "bigoted, capitalistic, nationalistic, arrogant, or otherwise narrow-minded Christians, which are in abundant supply here in the United States, at least."

Other essays assume a position of analyzing the film in relation to American politics, which seems strangely provincial, given that the film—directed by a British-born South African—is at least as concerned with European colonialism as it is with any other foreign power. Some readers might also object to the casual use of phrases such as one in the introductory essay that lumps "the Gospel" in with "other forms of Western imperialism."

I was also surprised to find that there was virtually no discussion of Dornford-May's previous film, U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, which won the Golden Bear when it premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2005. Like Son of Man, which sets the story of Jesus in a South African township, so too U-Carmen was an adaptation of the Bizet opera Carmen that was set in a South African township. Both films also starred Dornford-May's wife, Pauline Malefane (as Carmen and Mary), and were produced with a group of stage actors, currently known as the Isago Ensemble, who specialize in recontextualizing "Western" stories.

Last fall, shortly after the publication of Son of Man: An African Jesus, Dornford-May finished a third film that was both biblical and operatic: Unogumbe, based on Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde. In Dornford-May's film, it is Malefane as Mrs. Noah who builds the Ark, and it is her husband who spends all his time drinking—a gender switch that was prompted, according to the Ensemble's music director, by the fact that many South African children are raised by single mothers and the "men don't pull their weight."[2] Interestingly, Britten's opera was based on the Chester Mystery Plays and, as Son of Man: An African Jesus makes clear, there are elements in Dornford-May's Jesus film that borrow from those plays too.

Unogumbe was not yet available when this book was written, but U-Carmen certainly was—so, as valuable as it is to look at Son of Man as a product of South African culture and as a contribution to the Jesus-movie genre, it might have been profitable if at least one essay had looked at the film specifically through an auteurist lens, or through the lens of the ongoing recontextualization of "Western" stories that Dornford-May and his ensemble are engaged in.

In any case, Son of Man is one of the most bracing Jesus films to come down the pike in a long time, and it is worth a look, whatever one's theology or politics. And whatever flaws the book might have, Son of Man: An African Jesus Film does offer some excellent insights into the movie's cultural reference points and its connections to the Jesus-movie genre that might not be apparent to the casual viewer. On that level, it's an essential companion to the film.

Peter T. Chattaway is a freelance film critic and blogger at Patheos.com with a special interest in Bible movies. He lives with his family in Surrey, B.C.

1. I am reminded of how the promotional materials for the Jesus film (1979) made much of the fact that most of the film's actors were from Israel or other Middle Eastern territories—but the actor playing Jesus himself was an Englishman.

2. David Weininger, "In Church—and on Screen—'Noye's Fludde' delights," The Boston Globe, April 3, 2014. http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2014/04/03/church-and-screen-noye-fludde-delights/wW001ZTpEpNkyI7RALLDVN/story.html

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Booker T. Washington received a congratulatory telegram from W. E. B. Du Bois shortly after he delivered his speech at the 1895 Atlanta Cotton Exposition. The young sociologist who had considered joining the Tuskegee faculty praised the college president's words as "fitly spoken" and "the basis of a real settlement between whites and blacks in the South." Yet in the 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois dubbed the famous oration the "Atlanta Compromise" and upbraided Washington for both his politics and his commitment to industrial education. In critiquing Washington's program for the South, Du Bois lamented, "It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force."

Narrow Du Bois was not. His life spanned almost a century, from 1868 until 1963, and his longevity gave him ample opportunity to change his views on race politics. The mathematician and sociologist Kelly Miller marveled at Du Bois's philosophical shifts, which allowed him to change his opinion of Washington so dramatically: "It is almost impossible to conceive how the author of The Philadelphia Negro could have penned the second Niagara Movement Manifesto, without mental and moral metamorphosis." The transformation that Miller observed reflects Du Bois's untiring reassessment of black American existence. Kwame Appiah's Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity examines Du Bois's evolving thought and probes the contradictions at the heart of his conception of black identity. Seeking "to capture the ferment of the mind" that gave rise to Du Bois's ideas, which remain pivotal to current discussions of race and culture, Appiah casts his subject as both scientist and romantic, a man whose education pushed him beyond answers bound by logic alone.

Du Bois's 1958 return to Berlin to receive an honorary Doctor of Economics degree sets the stage for Appiah's approach to piecing together Du Bois's philosophical heritage. Portraying Du Bois's political and personal contradictions in ways that heighten his humanity, Appiah introduces him as a black man who was tried by Senator Joseph McCarthy at the age of eighty-three, became a citizen of Ghana when he was ninety-five, and sent a telegram of support to the March on Washington in 1963 before going to sleep on the night he died. The world-renowned sociologist from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, emerges as difficult to pin down yet impossible not to admire. Appiah gracefully renders Du Bois's intellectual formation in a study that is a pleasure to traverse for both the scholar and the casual reader.

Du Bois's first love was Germany. His embarkation to study in Berlin marked his maiden voyage away from U.S. racism. He brought a deep respect for the German academic system to his studies. Many of his most respected instructors at Harvard boasted a German degree, so Du Bois viewed this accomplishment as necessary to establishing his intellectual bona fides. His Berlin professors' vigorous political careers provided a template for the active engagement of the intellectual with the most pressing issues of the contemporary world. Issues such as the inequality of wealth and the class struggle received thorough examination from instructors like Max Lenz and August Meitzen, while his studies with Gustav von Schmoller challenged him to consider the moral and ethical aspects of his methodological approach. In fact, the abiding concern with the "Social Question" that the historical school probed equipped Du Bois with foundational principles for examining the Negro question. Even as he became aware of the racism articulated by professors such as Heinrich von Treitschke, Du Bois cherished the potent understanding of culture that held such promise for his work on Negro identity.

Appiah is at his best when explaining the impact of individual thinkers on Du Bois's complicated views of black America. He compellingly demonstrates Du Bois's determination to bring his German studies to bear on his study of the U.S. color line, and he helpfully describes how Du Bois found new inspiration in Johann Gottfried Herder's idea of individuality and the spiritual life of a nation. Herder's conception of a nation's Volksgeist—its national soul—acknowledged the importance of its intellectual achievements as well as its folklore. This basis for romantic nationalism spoke deeply to Du Bois, and he infused his best-known work with its abiding idea. In the literature of romanticism, with its emphasis on striving, Du Bois discovered the threads of a philosophical theory that enabled him to position the Negro as "a Folk among Folks" in such a way that "presupposes a reference to a global perspective." Pausing to elucidate the roots of Du Bois's passion for personal individuality alongside his deep belief in race groups, Appiah contrasts his ideas against the real-life practices of Booker T. Washington. Du Bois ultimately determined that individualist and collectivist strains needed savvy integration, and the struggle to achieve such a balance absorbed much of his life.

His efforts to redefine black identity were challenged by the scientific racism raging around him. Balancing his historical and sociological impulses, Du Bois joined the pseudoscientific discussions of the day by identifying eight distinct races that allowed him to move between the physical and spiritual attributes of different peoples. Ultimately, the idea of "striving" remained central as he hewed closely to the Hegelian philosophy that the Idea best defined a people. Du Bois's search for the Negro Idea led him back to his deep belief in the necessity that black Americans share their gifts with the world, a point he makes movingly in one of the best-known passages of Souls. Appiah details the many thinkers whose work aided Du Bois's evolving views on race, noting the importance of Hermann Lotze's skepticism about classification as Du Bois strove to "replace the biological conception with a historical and sociological" explanation of race. Franz Boas also assisted his project as he offered new ways to consider the relationship between biology and culture. Even as Du Bois denied the existence of a single Negro type, he sought to explain the distinctions that make racial belonging so important. Ultimately, he determined that people are bound by race by their recognition of belonging to the same group rather than by any discernible shared features. His pithy definition of blackness as "a person who must ride 'Jim Crow' in Georgia" explained race as a social construction in terms that would form the foundation of contemporary cultural studies.

Just as Du Bois struggled to align his personal depth of racial feeling with the scientific theories he studied, he strove to come to terms with the implications of the African past for black racial identity. Not until he heard Boas' 1906 commencement speech at Atlanta University did Du Bois begin to question the accepted notion that Africa lacked a legitimate history. Although he had written sporadically on the subject since 1903, it was only with the 1915 publication of The Negro that he began to consider African history in earnest. By 1939, Black Folk, Then and Now gave readers a more expansive picture of African history, which he extended still further in The World and Africa (1947).

These texts, Appiah observes, are informed by Du Bois's growing belief that Africa offered the "second front in his struggle to define the Negro." His sweeping overview of African history includes a detailed survey of slavery in sync with his cultural nationalism. Thus, in his most expansive work on Africa, Du Bois writes, "It may well be that Africa … was the birthplace of the human family and ancient Negro blood the basis of the blood of all men." Africa, Appiah concludes, ends up marking the limits of the idea of the Negro for Du Bois.

The very notion of black identity having limits raises the question of whether the Negro should persist indefinitely. If the idea of American blackness was defined by the effect of social practices, Du Bois required new methods for understanding race. Theories imbibed from his Berlin instructors gave way to the more malleable ideas of earlier mentors like Josiah Royce and William James. To clarify the relationship between Du Bois's work and philosophies of identity today, Appiah returns to the emergence of the modern idea of identity during Du Bois's formative years and beyond, casting a wide net that takes in James, George Herbert Mead, and others. Du Bois, Appiah concludes, drew on them to advocate a shift "from thinking of the Negro race as a natural, biological kind to thinking of it as composed of people who share a socially made identity." Although "until the end of his life [Du Bois] spoke of the Negro as a category that worked across societies, in ways that seem to ignore his own insight," Appiah leaves us with the image of Du Bois as a Moses leading the way to a social contructionist understanding of identity.

As compelling and elegant as Appiah's account is, his insistence upon Du Bois's cosmopolitanism feels a bit forced at times. But his mastery of the philosophical heritage from which Du Bois hails—together with the light touch of his own biography that he weaves throughout his study—mitigates against the feeling of an ideological push that detracts from an honest, rigorous exploration of one of the most important figures of African American thought. If Appiah's personal admiration for Du Bois leads to a somewhat romanticized view of the man's education, there can be no doubt about the impressive complexity of the life that unfolds in Lines of Descent.

Lena Hill is associate professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Iowa.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Acclaimed South African novelist and playwright Zakes Mda's Sometimes There Is a Void: Memoirs of an Outsider begins in ruins. He is visiting his family's ancestral home on Dyarhom Mountain, the setting for two years of his boyhood before his exile in Lesotho. His time there was itself a form of exile; his parents sent him to live with his grandparents after he got involved in Johannesburg's street gangs. Now every structure on his grandfather's estate is gone, and in its place on the mountain is a beekeeping collective Mda helped to found. He wanders the mountain with his wife in the opening pages of the book, pointing out the places where buildings used to stand as they come to life in his imagination and populate the now repurposed landscape.

This same imaginative exercise underpins The Sculptors of Mapungubwe, Mda's first novel since writing his memoir. It is a much more ancient past he resurrects here. The novel is set in the year 1223, in Mapungubwe (present-day South Africa's far north), a stratified land of ancient peasants, aristocrats, and Swahili traders. Rendani and Chata are sculptors raised as brothers by Zwanga, a master carver. Rendi is Zwanga's son and Chata the son of a !Kung woman who was once a servant in Zwanga's household. Both men have a talent for carving, but it is Chata who captivates Zwanga with his sculptures of many-limbed winged creatures that exist only in the spirit world his !Kung mother has taught him to navigate. Rendani's dutiful renderings of bulls fail to impress, and his bitterness over this is unassuaged even as he marries a princess, becomes the royal carver and a member of the king's household, and moves to the top of the hill where only Mapungubwe's élite live. The resulting feud between the two brothers eventually begins to involve the whole town.

A number of obvious parallels present themselves to make The Sculptors of Mapungubwe a fantastical stage for the working-out of concerns detailed in Sometimes There Is a Void, familial strife being the most apparent. Mda's own father was a famous figure in South Africa's liberation struggle, an attorney whose practice was far too principled to be lucrative. He and his son were constantly at odds, first over his insistence on disciplined austerity and political seriousness in his son, and later over Mda's failed relationships and inability to raise his own children. Mda's relationship with his siblings has hardly been better. Rendani's alienation from his family and his perpetual quest to win his father's approval is familiar and tellingly eternal, since the ancestors live on after death.

Chata resonates from a different place. He is a perpetual outsider in his own community, due both to his mother's heritage and to his propensity for traveling and living independently. No one understands his desire to take off with the Swahili traders or forgo marrying. For many years no one but Zwanga sees any worth in his sculptures. He is the creation of an exiled artist, an author who cannot be at home in his own South Africa, or in Lesotho, or in the United States.

The most sly and satisfying manifestation of Mda's inner landscape in this story is political. Sometimes There Is a Void is dominated by the shifting political allegiances of Mda's friends and family in the liberation struggle, and Mda himself is never quite comfortable with his own avowed Pan-Africanist (pac) sympathies. He has a tendency to speak frankly, to point out fault wherever he finds it, and within his own party he finds plenty to disturb him. His fellow pac exiles profess their desire for a unified Africa free from tribalism, and yet he remembers the way they would hail him in the street: "Greetings to you, African! You are the first person I have seen this whole day." The Basotho in whose nation they have all found refuge do not quite count as human. In The Sculptors of Mapungubwe we see Mda searching backwards in time, tracing the roots of this hypocritical tendency to dehumanize. The Mapungubweans apply their prejudice to those like the !Kung who hunt and gather without owning cattle or land. When Chata decides to give in to the ancestral itch for wandering that he inherited from his !Kung mother, Zwanga is horrified: "I brought you up for better things. You seem to forget that … I made you a person." When Chata is suspected of having an affair with a foreign beggar woman and they are both brought before the council of elders, the woman objects strongly to the terms in which she is described. She and her family lack land and livestock only because they lost it, not because they never had it in the first place. She is a person, however diminished, still capable of contempt for those beneath her who are not.

The PAC is not the only organization to incite Mda's criticism in his memoir. His strongest disgust is reserved for the African National Congress once they come to power in South Africa, as he sees cronyism take over in place of the democracy that has been promised. He is only one of many incapable of finding any employment with the government, as his father left the ANC and he himself is too outspoken for their taste. He has no explanation for the actions of those "who always occupied the moral high ground during the liberation struggle and who sacrificed careers and families in pursuit of justice, fairness, and equality, but whose snouts are now buried deep in the troughs of corporate crony capitalism." His desire is simply to continue to write, though it is clear he is unsure if the posture of an artist has been the correct one through his life. Apart from one half-hearted, botched assassination attempt as a teenager, he refused all calls to become a warrior. This was not the result of conviction, he tells us, but simply of not having a heart for armed resistance and killing. Part of him is ashamed of this, though his position outside the ruling party, he realizes, may be good for him as an artist.

We can see him turning this conundrum over in The Sculptors of Mapungubwe, where Rendani stops creating any art at all upon joining the royal family, despite his position as Royal Sculptor. It is only Chata whose creativity continues to rule his life, his energy untapped by ambition. The work itself is all that matters.

In The Sculptors of Mapungubwe Mda has fashioned a fascinating and beautiful narrative arena in which all these ideas can play out, though the novel suffers at times from his use of overly simplistic language and syntax. (This is a common problem with fiction set in the far-distant past, an over-compensation prompted by fear of imposing modernized thought patterns and dialogue where they don't belong.) Like Mda's impressive memoir, The Sculptors of Mapungubwe is a void-filling project, not least because it brings to life a time and place ignored by history. As a young man Mda sided with the Igbo during Nigeria's Biafran war simply because he had read Achebe. "That's the power of narrative for you," he says. "We always sympathize with those whose story we know."

Mda writes to fill the void in our collective narrative as well as the void within himself—and yet even as he does so, he acknowledges that he will never succeed. At the close of Sometimes There Is a Void, Mda mentions The Sculptors of Mapungubwe as a book yet-to-be-written, one of a list of stories rattling around in his brain that his memoir-writing is holding up. These stories seem to torment him as unsculpted images torment Chata, calling to be added to his life's effort.

The void, he says, only widens.

Catherine Hervey is a writer in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, where she lives with her husband and daughter.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

What was the relationship between Christian missions and European colonialism in West Africa? For decades Western and African historians have agreed on an answer—with support from leading authors and activists. It goes like this: When the Atlantic slave trade ended at last in the 19th century, missionaries arrived along the same sea routes. Both along the coast, where slave trading had been a flourishing business since the 17th century, and in the interior, where few white faces had ever been seen, the missionaries settled in, learned local languages, and devised writing systems for Bible translation. Alongside colonial authorities they built schools, clinics, and roads. Thus they sought to bring both the spiritual benefits of the gospel and the economic and political benefits of modernity to communities long burdened by paganism, ignorance, isolation, disease, and poverty.

But their seemingly benevolent intentions—so the story continues—masked a program of domination and control, setting the stage for two centuries of colonial and postcolonial exploitation. The benefits of modernity carried a heavy cost. Communities and families were torn apart by alien systems of hierarchical and centralized authority. Traditional beliefs in the unity of gods, humans, and animals gave way to a new creed of human dominion over creation. No more slaves were loaded aboard departing ships, but now they carried minerals and crops produced by cheap native labor. Africa's self-proclaimed benefactors uprooted ancient traditions, disrupted families and communities, and instilled a slavish imitation of all things European. Native subalterns cast aside their traditional skins and cloths and donned suits and neckties, carrying in their hands shoes too precious (and too uncomfortable) to wear. And they forsook their own traditions for Western concepts of God, the self, and community. But their Faustian bargain haunts Africa today, as its people languish in a cycle of poverty, corruption, and neocolonial exploitation. Underdevelopment and poverty are sustained by the anomie and displacement created when an alien modernity was imposed by outsiders.

The Nigerian American philosopher Olúfémi Táíwò isn't buying this story. In his account of How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa, he insists that modernization is not a bane but a boon in Africa. But colonizers did NOT join missionaries in seeking its advance. Rather, although missionaries systematically planted the seeds of a more peaceful and prosperous Africa by disseminating modern institutions and attitudes, their efforts were stymied by the fundamentally opposed mentalities and objectives of European governors and functionaries.

Táíwò, who is professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University, argues that a salutary and beneficial process of modernization was underway in West Africa 150 years ago, led by Africans who had been prepared for leadership roles in the church; but this process was impeded, and ultimately reversed, by the imposition of colonial rule in the latter part of the 19th century. Rich in historical detail and sometimes dense with philosophical explication, Táíwò's study challenges several widely accepted orthodoxies: that modernity is an invasive intruder into African modes of life; that Christian missionaries were forerunners and faithful servants of colonial masters; and that Africa's salvation lies in reaffirming "authentically African" values and traditions.

A key to Táíwò's argument is his concept of modernity, which he traces to the political philosophy of Hegel and the notion of "subjectivity" that is central to the modern self. On his reading of Hegel, we encounter the world as subjects, privileging reason in our deliberations but acknowledging no ultimate authority except our own. "Individualism is the dominant principle of social ordering in the modern era," Táíwò writes. "It is the manifestation in the social sphere of the principle of subjectivity. Subjectivity arose from the ashes of antiquity in which community and consensus predominated."

From this core other characteristic features of modernity follow, including the principle that all legitimate authority rests on consent. A modern subject cannot acknowledge the right of another to rule simply because of lineage, social ascription, or mere coercive power. Every political hierarchy not built on consent is a sham. In Hegel's words, quoted by Táíwò, "the right of the subject's particularity, his right to be satisfied, or in other words the right of subjective freedom, is the pivot and centre of the difference between ancient and modern times."

This is a controversial reading of Hegel, highlighting the advance of modern over ancient political orders but downplaying his rejection of atomistic liberal theory. Society is not composed of separate individuals, according to Hegel, but rather constitutes subjects as subjects and makes their freedom possible.[1] Táíwò has chosen instead to focus narrowly on Hegel's theory of individual subjectivity, a reading supported by some contemporary theorists who draw on Hegel (such as Charles Taylor, not mentioned in this study) that others would challenge.

Philosophical ideas have shaped Africa's history, argues Táíwò. When historians and politicians credit missionaries and colonizers with instilling modernity and individuality, they are only half right. Missionaries of the early 19th century—a second wave of African missions, long after the first wave who accompanied earlier explorers and traders—did indeed bring a gospel of modernity along with the Christian gospel. They sought to instill in African converts a new sense of individual responsibility and agency, rejecting the pagan past and embracing a new identity as redeemed sinners called to service in Christ's kingdom. Mission leaders pursued this goal by nurturing African leaders for African churches. But colonialism did not carry this process of modernization to the next stage; rather, it systematically set out to reverse it.

Henry Venn (1796-1873), a leading figure in West African missions, called for "the euthanasia of mission" as native church leaders assume leadership responsibilities. Táíwò singles out three "prophets of modernity" in West Africa: Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1806-1891) of Liberia and Nigeria, the first non-European Protestant bishop since the Reformation; James Africanus Beale Horton (1835-1917), a Sierra Leonean physician and public servant; and Rev. S. R. B. Attoh-Ahuma (1863-1901), Gold Coast pastor and journalist.[2] Each exemplified a critical and discriminating affirmation of the values of modernity, tempered by respect for African traditions. All three can be seen as "modern" figures in three senses: they regarded themselves as independent and autonomous subjects; they affirmed and also challenged both African and European ideals and customs; and they anticipated a new order of self-governing African nation-states.

Modernization did not advance quickly, however—then or now. Democracy has not flourished; the rule of law remains fragile where it exists at all; and Africans have little say in the economic and political forces that shape their lives. Two opposing reasons are frequently offered. Some blame the persistence of the worst aspects of the past: ethnic conflict, opportunistic self-advancement, cronyism, and elevation of group and family loyalty over fairness and rule of law. Africa has never achieved modernization, they say, because it remains so stubbornly African. Others turn this account on its head: modernization was an alien import unsuited to the African context, and the colonizers' fundamental error was to disregard the achievements and potential of African modes of life. African societies unwisely abandoned their own traditions. Africa is not yet modern, on this account, because modernity is not African.

Táíwò rejects both of these narratives. The missionaries of the early 19th century did indeed preach modernization, judging correctly that a greater sense of subjectivity and independent agency would bring many benefits. Modernity in the philosophical sense, the affirmation of individuality and reason, is neither European nor African in its essence, neither Christian nor pagan. It is simply a necessary precondition of social progress. Colonialism did not advance this process but sought instead to reverse it. Nothing inherent in African personality or society prevented colonizers from following the missionaries' example. Instead they systematically suppressed African agency to facilitate their rule.

Early 19th-century missionaries in West Africa, Táíwò argues, exemplified an "autonomy model" of hierarchy and social subordination. Its goal was to uplift those who are temporarily under others' instruction and foster personal and social subjectivity. It is a temporary and self-limiting mode of subordination. The "aid model," by contrast, offers help to those who are considered incapable of making their own decisions. The dominant group in this case "substitutes its own agency for that of the subordinate group and proceeds to exercise it on the latter's behalf." And this distinction, he writes,

ultimately turned on the philosophical anthropology that dominated each cohort's attitudes toward Africans and their place in the concert of humanity … . For the earlier missionary group, Africans were the same as other human beings but were either unequal with other humans or different from but equal with them. For the administrator class, Africans were different from and unequal with other human beings. The first group thought that Africans could exercise agency but needed to be taught how best to do so; the second insisted that agency would be too much of a burden for Africans and proceeded to substitute their agency for that of the natives.

Colonial authority was motivated by, and sought to entrench, an aid model of European intervention in West Africa. It did not adopt but displaced the recognition of Africans' fundamental humanity missionaries had embraced. Christian missionaries had planted the seeds and nurtured new shoots of self-reliance and independence. To the colonizers, these were weeds to be uprooted and destroyed.

Táíwò also challenges the widespread view—a commonplace of neocolonialist theories—that the introduction of European modes of life was inimical to authentic African communal life. Indeed, he disputes the very notion of authentic African modes of life, which in his view are ideological constructs of colonialism, intended to rationalize and solidify colonial domination. In West Africa, in particular, colonizers promulgated supposedly African ideals in order to nullify African autonomy and to baptize European exploitation as a form of benevolence. Thus Frederick Lugard, an influential British author and administrator, boasted of providing "all the gains of civilization by applied science (whether in the development of natural resources, or the eradication of disease, & c.), with as little interference as possible with Native customs and modes of thought." From this ideology arose the systematic disparagement and dismantlement of African agency and a retrogressive policy to which Táíwò attaches a colorful label:

Sociocryonics is the ignoble science of cryopreserving social forms, arresting them and denying them and those whose social forms they are the opportunity of deciding what, how, and when to keep any of their social forms … . Once European administrators adopted sociocryonics as colonial policy, African progress was arrested in the name of preserving (the cryonic moment) what they, the rulers, decided was the African way of being human.

There is exaggeration here—is this analysis or caricature?—but some of the evidence cited is telling. Consider the seldom-noted distinction between early British colonies, limited to urban centers such as Freetown and Lagos, and surrounding "protectorates." The former enjoyed legal systems whose rules and procedures were modeled on those of the mother country. In the protectorates, however, "native institutions" were preserved and residents had no rights as citizens. The failure of most historians to take note of this distinction suggests to Táíwò that "they have not taken seriously the idea of the legal subject and the peculiarly modern metaphysical template from which it is fashioned." Such colonial policies helped set the stage for a mode of autocracy operating above the law that is all too familiar in recent African history. Indeed, we can hear echoes of what Táíwò brands "sociocryonics" in every public speech by a political leader who spurns the petty constraints of Western democratic institutions—whether these be term limits, judicial and legislative independence, or public accountability for public funds—because his authority stands on a foundation of uniquely African values.

My discussion, like Táíwò's, has focused primarily on British colonial rule in West Africa. Although he provides comparisons from time to time with British territories elsewhere, he acknowledges the limits of his analysis and expresses the hope that others will investigate similar developments outside the British orbit. Other colonial powers followed very different paths in creating and eventually liberating their own colonies, after all. The French extended full citizenship rights to a very small subset of their African subjects, acknowledging the possibility of African agency in ways the British never permitted. Hierarchies of power were far more rigid in the Portuguese and Belgian colonies, whose economic successes were built on systematic exclusion of natives from even the most limited managerial roles, and their transition to independence was far more difficult. Whether a similar opposition between missionary efforts to nurture political agency and colonial determination to suppress it played a role in these other colonial empires remains to be determined on the basis of others' investigations.

Extending the scope would also correct one of the most serious omissions in Táíwò's account: in focusing wholly on the transition from Christian mission to British colonialism, he overlooks the role of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa. Relationships between religion and colonial politics unfolded along very different lines in heavily Islamic regions such as the Sahel. Islam was already widely embraced before the colonialists arrived, having been brought by Muslim traders to West Africa as early as the 8th and 9th centuries, to the Swahili Coast even earlier. The Arab world had long been a vital trading partner with sub-Saharan Africa, not only for agricultural and manufactured goods but also as partners in the East African-Middle Eastern slave trade that flourished throughout the 19th century. The face of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa has been quite different from its form in the Arab world, however: more flexible and pragmatic, less doctrinally focused, and more tolerant of accommodation to local beliefs and customs. There is a sense, perhaps, in which African Islam anticipated some elements of European modernity long before they were imported from the West, in ways that are far less visible in Islam's heartland.

How Colonialism Pre-Empted Modernity in Africa is an important book that deserves the attention of any student of Christian missions or African politics. It offers a cautionary corrective to any appeal to an idealized African past or to traditional African values as a rationale for contemporary political or economic institutions and practices, and it reminds us of the essential role of philosophical assumptions in the establishment and administration of political institutions. The fundamental conception of the nature of the person—the philosophical anthropology—that underlay the work of the missionaries of the early 19th century, Táíwò has shown, differed dramatically from that brought to Africa by the administrators and colonialists a few decades later. And from these differences have arisen some of the most intractable problems of contemporary political life in Africa.

Táíwò's distinction between the "aid" and the "autonomy" model of European assistance is no less relevant today, for example in recent debates over whether, after a half-century of foreign assistance totaling a trillion dollars, aid should be increased (as argued by Jeffrey Sachs, Bono, and many leaders in the nonprofit realm) or cut back sharply, if not eliminated (so argues Dambiso Moyo, and Paul Collier and William Easterly concur in part).[3]

All the antagonists in this debate uphold "autonomy" as their goal, decrying the perpetual dependence inherent in the "aid" alternative. Modernity has won the day, and colonialist "sociocryonics" has been discredited. Yet beneath the surface are traces of the same diverging philosophies, more subtle in expression but no less influential on policies and practices. Some government-funded foreign aid efforts assume that donors know best how to respond to famine, natural disaster, and persistent poverty. Some church groups return again and again to build another school and dig another well, spending ten dollars on airfare for every dollar invested in the partner community, giving little thought to overall priorities as understood by local communities. These examples betray a persistent belief that the more "advanced" and more fortunate members of the human family know best how to reach out to help the more "backward" and less fortunate. But other forms of assistance, both governmental and private, embody the "autonomy" model that Táíwò finds in the second wave of African missions. Educational assistance, business development programs, long-term church partnerships, and the like, in which Africans plan and administer assistance programs with others' help, exemplify a philosophy of equality and mutual recognition, not hierarchy or paternalism.

Táíwò is able to draw effectively on the theoretical resources of philosophy and the historical record of precolonial and colonial history, and from their synthesis he draws important lessons for the ways in which we conceptualize the relationship between Africa and the West. Upending many unquestioned assumptions about the work of missionaries and colonialists, he offers a fresh perspective on Africa's past and sheds new light on its present challenges.

David A. Hoekema is professor of philosophy at Calvin College. He has taught and directed study abroad programs in Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda.

1. In his lectures on history, Hegel made notoriously dismissive comments concerning the primitive mentality and limited capacity of Africans, and yet if he had not been entirely ignorant of the nature of traditional African societies he might have found much to admire in their organic unity.

2. Táíwò provides only a birthdate for Horton, no dates for Attoh-Ahuma. Dates above are from Dictionary of African Christian Biography (www.dacb.org) and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

3. See for example Sachs, 2006; Sachs, 2008; Moyo, 2010; Collier, 2006; and Easterly, 2007.

Books discussed in this essay:

Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010).

William Easterly, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2007).

Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010).

Jeffrey Sachs, Commonwealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (Penguin, 2008).

Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Times (Penguin, 2006).

Olúfémi Táíwò, How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa (Indiana Univ. Press, 2010).

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I am shouting but you don't answer—

One day you'll look for me and I'll be gone from this world.

Such was the landay—a two-line folk poem repeated over centuries among Afghan nomads and farmers—that Rahila Muska recited over the phone to fellow Afghan women in 2010. A women's literary group, Mirman Baheer, meets every Saturday afternoon in the capital, Kabul, and hosts a call-in hotline that attracts young poets from rural provinces. After Rahila's sister caught her reading love poetry, Rahila's brothers beat her and destroyed her notebooks. Two weeks later, Rahila set herself on fire, then died.

Journalist and poet Eliza Griswold told Rahila's and other Afghan women's stories for The New York Times Magazine in 2012. Griswold's newest book—I Am the Beggar of the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), featuring photography by Seamus Murphy—is a collection of landay translations, which provide a window into the often unseen, surprising dimensions of Afghan women's lives. Many of the landays are bodily and bawdy. One memorable example from the book's opening section, on Love:

I'll kiss you in the pomegranate garden. Hush!

People will think there's a goat in the underbrush.

Others are brazenly confrontational, challenging husbands and fathers (most of Afghanistan's 15 million women are married by age 16; three out of four are forced marriages) as well as the political forces that shape their future:

May God destroy your tank and your drone,

You who've destroyed my village, my home.

Griswold read many of the landays aloud at this year's Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College. Later, she spoke with Katelyn Beaty about the work of translating them as well as the ways they connect to Griswold's other work: The Tenth Parallel, a journalistic look at Christianity's and Islam's collision along the latitude line 700 miles north of the equator, and Wideawake Field, her 2008 collection of poetry.

Part of the effect of the landays is to complicate our understanding of what life is like among women in a strict Islamic country. In that way, this new book seems connected to what you achieve with The Tenth Parallel. In what ways are the two projects linked?

First, you're exactly right, that what interests me about observing the world is rendering things that are too simple, that we at a distance see too simply, into three-dimensional reality. I write my own poems, and that's probably more of a straight line. The line from Wideawake Field to the landays is that I'm very interested in the idea of sacred time—in poetry that punctures the quotidian and reaches by nature of its ceremonial aspect toward the divine. Although landays are very, very earthy, they are also about ceremony, about invoking another way of being. They are still told at weddings, around campfires. The question is, how do they not only give voice to women's everyday experience but also elevate that experience into something larger than its parts? It's not just about cooking spinach; it's about being married to an abusive husband.

You write that the landays "frustrate any image of a Pashtun woman as a mute ghost in a blue burqa." In what ways?

Well, in the content, right? The women take on spousal abuse, repression, the daily misery of a woman's life, being sold into marriage to a much older man. They're talking about societal taboos.

How do they function among the women who are repeating them?

Folk poetry over millennia is typically an oral tradition, mostly because it comes from illiterate people. It's not about writing words down; again, it's about puncturing secular time, puncturing the quotidian. Folk poetry isn't a literary tradition, it's the opposite—it's a tradition that belongs to everyone. Landays can be sung by both men and women, but the majority are sung in the voices of women, because what they're singing about is a woman's experience. So they have been traded, passed along for centuries, probably millennia. The most popular thinking on them is that they come out of a nomadic tradition, that they were a form of communication in caravans.

Many of the landays you've collected have overt political content, critiquing Hamid Karzai, U.S. troops, and the Taliban, for example. How effective are they in effecting political change in Afghanistan?

They have no capacity to change political outcomes.

Is your hope that they will effect at least attitudinal change in the West?

Sure, they certainly helped me rethink assumptions that I made. They complicated my understanding of an Afghan woman as beneath the burqa, having a less sophisticated understanding of the forces working in her life. In fact, her sense of the forces working in her life is far more sophisticated than what I see as an outsider. I could come in as an outsider: "Oh, she's suffering in ways she doesn't understand, she doesn't even know what it would be to have an education." But she knows more than I do, and landays reveal that. So the way they helped inform my understanding, I certainly hope they do that for readers as well.

Talk about the work of translating them. What was the process of achieving accuracy, both translating them from Pashto into English and also going from the oral to the written form?

The transcription was undertaken by two young Afghan women, one of whom has died, as you know (the book is dedicated to her). We would sit with groups of women, and I would have conversations with them. My translator would render that into Pashto, and the women would speak in Pashto and repeat the poems back. My translator would write them down.

Then we'd go home with a very loose understanding of what that poem meant, and over months we'd trade that poem between ourselves but also between other journalists and professors and poets.

A landay is just about nine words, and if you translated the poem literally, word by word by word, it would sound like nonsense when you read it aloud in English: "moon," "star," etc. I usually had a loose understanding of what the poem meant before I saw the literal version. So we'd work through it to get the layers of meaning in that poem into English.

Do you see these as fitting or not fitting into a Western feminist literary tradition?

I know nothing about Western feminist literary tradition. I'm just interested in the poems themselves as poems. I think it would be really dangerous to make some sort of connection between Western feminist theory and these folk poems from Afghanistan.

Obviously you spent a lot of time with these women in their communities. How did that experience affect you personally—as a poet, as a journalist?

That's a good question. The two relationships in this project that affected me most were my relationships with the young women who were translators. Asma Fafi, whom the project is dedicated to, got sick after we worked together. It turned out that she had an undiagnosed heart condition, and she had an operation that didn't go very well. The thinking is that she contracted an infection; she died on her way to the hospital in Kabul with her little brother in the taxi. Even though she was extraordinarily conservative on the outside, she was very dedicated to the future of Afghanistan as a functioning society—even beyond what she herself wanted to participate in. So my relationship with Asma definitely helped open my mind to the many identities that an Afghan girl (she was in her early twenties) might carry within her.

My second translator, a young woman who goes by the initial Z. in the book, is also in her early twenties. She's worked professionally with journalists and NGO types and different Westerners since she was in her early teens. And she doesn't understand the strictures that her mother and other women of that generation simply accept. She received a death threat from the Taliban pretty recently, for working with foreigners. She had to leave Kabul. The challenges for young girls trying to make their own lives in Afghanistan are considerable.

The landays' power comes from their lowness, their earthiness—they're not high and literary. That has certainly given me confidence to work in English in the same way. They rely on humor and sassiness and bawdiness, and I love all of that in poetry and would hope to work more in a tradition that is of the earth.

I also hope that readers think, What can I do? There's plenty to do to commit to girls' education in Afghanistan and elsewhere. I hope that these poems serve as an impetus to reach out.

Katelyn Beaty is print managing editor of Christianity Today magazine. She is writing a book about women and work (Howard, 2016).

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

"I know of no other twentieth-century American writer as much admired and respected as William Stafford," avers Ted Kooser on the front cover of this slim volume. I'm somewhat alarmed to learn that Kooser, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, does not know of T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, Henry James, Ezra Pound, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and a hundred others, but on the bright side he has a lot of great reading to look forward to.

If I sound a bit testy, it's because Kooser's talking about a poet who defined poetry, in his aptly-titled poem "Poetry," as "a flower in the parking lot / of The Pentagon." I mean, why not just define it as a rainbow and have done with it?

This sentimental floriculture can't be dismissed as a rare lapse—a hundred flowers bloom in the bad parking lots of Stafford's poems. Perhaps this explains his popularity during his lifetime, extraordinary for such a minor poet. He won the National Book Award for Traveling through the Dark, whose title poem could be found in any anthology when I was in high school and college. It's one of his more successful numbers, about finding a dead deer on a mountain road. "It is usually best to roll them into the canyon: / that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead." The deer, he discovers, is pregnant, its fawn still alive. He hesitates, then pushes the body with its cargo "over the edge into the river."

If only he had done the same with more of his poems. The editor of Ask Me, Stafford's son Kim, informs us in his introduction that Stafford composed more than twenty thousand poems. This is, by a couple orders of magnitude, too many. "By comparison," noted William Logan in his review for Poetry, "Eliot wrote about 70 poems." Stafford was a kind and humble man, and his better poems are nervily plain-spoken, like Frost without the frostiness. If he had concentrated his gifts into a few hundred poems, we might have more lines like the opening tercet of "One Home":

Mine was a Midwest home—you can keep your world.
Plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code.
We sang hymns in the house; the roof was near God.

This makes a virtue of its clichés, capturing something of the original force of Puritanism. The slant rhymes reinforce the semantic linkage of world-code-God, an idealized organic whole reinvigorated by the snapping terseness of the lines, each word a single syllable except for the name of the locale in which the other words find a home.

But elsewhere terseness turns to laxity. There's a Thomas Kinkade quality to Stafford's many mawkish poems, which can recall inspirational posters: "Like a child again, you breathe on the world, and it shines." "The world" shows up a lot. "It's our only friend," and yesterday "the sun came, / Why, / It came." And it'll come out tomorrow, too, you can bet your bottom dollar.

Kim Stafford tells a revealing anecdote about one of his father's readings. "I could have written that," an audience member said after hearing a poem. "But you didn't," Stafford responded. "But you could write your own." This moves Stafford the younger to rhapsodize: "You could write your own. What a democratic idea. Each of us could write our own poem, our own proposal for peace, our own aphoristic meditation … our own consolation, manifesto, blessing."

Let's not and say we did. This spirit infuses Stafford's poetry, softening the hard particulars required by perception and discrimination, forever informing "the world" about "freedom" and "poetry" and "wisdom" and "peace." He praises what "makes us alike, all offspring of powerful / forces, part of one great embrace of democracy, / united across every boundary." This is like "We Are the World" without the music, without the singular voices of Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen.

Surely the truly democratic idea is one that recognizes that each of us could not, in fact, write our own poem—that calls for an egalitarian distribution not of poetic gifts (which remain stubbornly anti-democratic) but of the ability to appreciate them when they appear in others. "The darkness around us is deep," Stafford wrote, and it surely is. All the more reason to insist upon nuance and precision, to bring forth, as Whitman put it, "retrievements out of the night."

Michael Robbins is the author of two collections of poetry: Alien vs. Predator (Penguin) and The Second Sex (just published by Penguin). He teaches creative writing at Montclair State University.

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Here is an abridged version of Christian Wiman's resume: He edited the magazine Poetry for a decade. He has authored four books of verse: The Long Home, Hard Night, Every Riven Thing, and, now, Once in the West. He has, in addition, published scores of prose pieces, chief among them a spiritual autobiography named My Bright Abyss. He is, by any account, one of America's preeminent living poets.

He is also dying.

I know: we all are—but the difference is that most of us get to die unwittingly for a good long while. In fact, most of us get to die slowly enough that we can blithely call all but the last few months (or less, if we can avoid catastrophe) of our dying "living." Wiman, on the other hand, had not yet turned forty when he learned the polysyllabic label for an illness all but guaranteed to stop his pulse and breath. It is a blood cancer, and it has no known remedy. It follows no reliable program. So, while he cannot be sure that he's dying faster than the rest of us (I pray he isn't), Christian Wiman is not blithe about either life or death.

At least not in any of the poems in Once in the West, which plumb the poet's boyhood and adolescence in West Texas and survey, too, the other places, other stories Wiman encountered after he had come of age. As for the kind of things that catch his attention, they include "a pick-up / aboil / with birddogs" on one occasion and a flotilla of crocodiles on another. He writes about evocative outings: visiting a gardener who decorates with "random wall-blobs impastoed with jewels and jowls" and visiting Chicago's Shedd Aquarium with his wife, his twins. For all its everyday oddities and beauties, though, the centripetal force in this book is mortality.

And it's no wonder, of course, that Wiman is not blithe in extremis. Anyone acquainted with grave illness would expect that. As for the lucky, the uninitiated, they will find ample evidence of the automatic panic sickness triggers in a number of these poems—for instance, "Winterlude," in which a hospital's "painlady" interrupts the "mad metastasis of Now" with "morphine moon[s]."

Neither, however, is the poet blithe given the urgent joy of a toddler who, "elliptically, electrically alive," promises unbidden "I will love you in the summertime, Daddy." On the contrary, he reports that the child's lilting words unspool beneath "a moon-blued, cloud-strewn night sky / like an X ray / with here a mass and there a mass / and everywhere a mass."

What's more, Wiman's poems never sentimentalize the years when he was carefree or careless or closer to it, the years when death and heaven remained for him, each in their turn, sometimes abstract succor and sometimes abstract rot. To wit: after describing his boyhood pastime of shooting birds to the tune of a "little killing ditty," the writer states,

I felt nothing, and I will not betray those days
if days are capable of being betrayed
by pretending a pang in my larval heart

or even some starveling joy when Tuffy yelped.
I took aim at things I could not name.
And the ditty helped.

In these six lines, Wiman faults his outgrown invulnerability but also his grownup impulse to touch up the past, to paint his coolness as spoiled innocence. He blames himself, in other words, for once making carnage trivial by way of a jingle, but he also blames himself for edging his callousness toward poignancy by way of a poem.

At the same time as the poet recognizes that "little killing ditt[ies]" take death too lightly, though, he insists that triumphant hymns do, too. Therefore, he swats the glib believers for whom eternity sunnily eclipses mortality. A reluctant son of the Baptist church, the poet writes, "We lived in the long intolerable called God. / We seemed happy." The lyric continues: "I mean the always alto and surely anusless angels / divvying up the deviled eggs and jello salad in the after-rapture." Let it be said: here Wiman's disdain finds an excellent helpmate in his cleverness, just as it does in a number of his essays (see the book reviews in Ambition and Survival). To assign angels to apportion deviled eggs, to make them preside over a church potluck they can eat but never excrete, to parody those who think their pietistic gesturing toward the next world excuses their petty posturing in this one: it's shrewd enough revenge to gratify Dante.

Still, this poem, "We Lived," does not just send up the churchgoer-as-angel, whose easy sentimentality any real angel would cremate. No: the poem is almost as quick to repentance as it is to scorn. It barely finishes sketching God's trite "fervent servants" before it announces "I mean / to be mean." And then repents. Then again, this repentance is not renunciation—a pattern that holds throughout Once in the West.

Even where this collection's poems are repentant, after all, they are unapologetic. They entertain bitterness. They are quick to anger, quick to complaint, quick to sneer and to keen. But these poems also utter praise. Take "My Stop is Grand," in which one of Chicago's elevated trains "screechingly peaco*ck[s] / a grace of sparks." The image is arresting in itself, but it's Wiman's resistance to dewy emotion that makes his awe compelling. His reverence is cauterized, stark, hard-won, and not inspired by the standard beauties. For example, the El that occasions praise with "a grace of sparks" also "shoot[s] through a hell / of ratty alleys," as the poem makes clear just lines earlier.

By the same token, Once in the West does not try to squeeze neat meanings from its wonderment, as the two poems that feature this volume's name say outright. "Razing a Tower" begins, "Once in the west I rose to witness / the cleverest devastation," and it ends

A whisper-rupture, feathery detonation,
last concussive flush of a great heart giving way
and all the outworn stories collapsed in a kind of apocalyptic plié.

Vanish the dancer and the dance remains a time, an agile absence on the air.
I cannot say what, or why, or even when it was.
I only know it happened, and I was there.

These lines, then, bear witness to an awful wonder, an "apocalyptic plié," but rather than pulling some fatal moral from it, the poet stops, dumbfounded. Moreover, taken together, Wiman's poems argue that to stop dumbfounded might be the substance of veneration—and maybe even all that worship requires.

The end of the poem "Witness" makes much the same argument. It reads:

Once in the west I lay down dying
to see something other than the dying stars
so singularly clear, so unassailably there,
they made me reach for something other.
I said I will not bow down again
to the numinous ruins.
I said I will not violate my silence with prayer.
I said Lord, Lord
in the speechless way of things
that bear years, and hard weather, and witness.

Here, too, the words of the poem draw attention to what they cannot say, defining silence as more reverent than doxology and witness as sufficient praise, trying, in the words of another of these poems "to surrender / to the wonder / nothing / means."

Such surrender—to the stunning world that does not mean but is—also plays out in Once in the West's refusal to summon up a hypothetical heaven, even one far more eccentric than the pastel version drawn for "all the good / Godcoddled children." In My Bright Abyss, where some of this volume's poems first appeared, Wiman writes explicitly that "piety forbids one to imagine any afterlife that makes this life seem altogether inferior," which means, in practice, that it "forbids one from imagining any afterlife at all." Put otherwise, we human beings cannot invent a heaven without blaspheming against the earth—both by passing over its stunning matter too casually and by overlooking the truth that the kingdom of God is already at hand.

Wiman, consequently, binds himself "to the things of this world," as Richard Wilbur named them, contending that "love calls us to the things of this world." Indeed, throughout Once in the West, Christian Wiman takes this aphorism to its extreme, for the things of this world are, as one of the poems in Every Riven Thing says, "praiseful things." And to be blithe about any of them would be to blaspheme.

Given that conviction, I think it possible that even Wiman's derision for God—as where he asks, "Lord if I implore you please just please leave me alone / is that a prayer that's every instant answered?"—is a species of devotion. This poem closes:

And there is the suffering of primal
silence,

which seeps and drifts like a long fog
that when it lifts

leaves nothing
but the same poor sod.

Dear God—

Granted, one could read these words as impious. "The same poor sod" could be the dirt that steadily waits but does not merit the planting of anything besides the eventual coffin, but it could just as easily be a slang epithet for God. But I think that reading is wrong. I think that if "poor sod" is an epithet, it's an epithet for the poet—and for the reader. I think that the slant rhyme of "poor sod" and "Dear God" is shorthand, and that what it abbreviates is the fact that we, the "quintessence of dust," are nevertheless kin to our Lord. I think Christian Wiman is right: if God and sod rhyme, that leaves no room for us to be blithe.

Jane Zwart teaches writing and literature at Calvin College.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Many decades ago my six-year-old daughter Heidi came home from church and announced, "I'm not going back to Sabbath school ever again." "And why not?" I asked. "Because they don't teach the Bible there. They just teach Ellen White," she said.

This was awkward, because her father was a Seventh-day Adventist pastor at the time, and many Adventists consider White a prophet of near-biblical standing. We compromised. She would go to her father's church service on Saturdays, but on Sundays she could attend Sunday school at the Presbyterian church down the street.

Heidi didn't know how lucky she was: her kindergarten class was only listening to endless stories about White's childhood. By contrast, her sister's primary class was pretending to escape pretend end-times persecution by fleeing to pretend mountains. Molly, 8, may not have realized that this dramatized apocalypse was based on White's writings, but she happily joined her sister at the terror-free Sunday school.

I sympathized with the girls. A scrupulous and studious child, I was immersed in White's writings throughout 17 years of SDA education. I knew that for some children, her books should come with trigger warnings, and I was relieved when my family joined an entirely different denomination a couple of years after the kids' defection to the Presbyterians.

So when I learned through Facebook that a consortium of scholars—some of them friends and former classmates—had published a book called Ellen Harmon White: American Prophet, I picked it up with reluctance. I'm glad I got past my initial hesitation: it turned out to be an engrossing study of an era, a church, and an indomitable woman I didn't know nearly as well as I thought I did.

The book will no doubt interest current and former Adventists, but even those who aren't sure who White was may find it fascinating. Adventists are everywhere: there are 18 million of them worldwide (and only 15 million Mormons). They have made major contributions to American culture: corn flakes, veggie burgers, so-called creation scientists. More important, at least to history buffs, White's story is the story of 19th-century America in microcosm.

Unlike tendentious pro- or anti-Adventist literature, Ellen Harmon White sets its subject squarely in her historical and social milieu: a time of religious barnstorming, racial conflict, institution building, and geographical expansion; a time when reform movements in health, education, care for the poor, and women's rights proliferated. This was the environment that formed White, and that White in turn helped to form.

With a foreword by Duke University historian Grant Wacker, the book has 18 chapters and 20 authors—"Adventists, ex-Adventists, and non-Adventists"—all of them scholars and most of them university professors. Often such an erudite lineup results in a densely unreadable or, at best, uneven book. Not here. The editorial team has gathered and shaped a group of clear, interesting writers who avoid academic jargon while looking at White under different aspects.

Jonathan Butler's opening chapter, "A Portrait," sets the stage with a biographical and cultural summary. Born in 1827, young Ellen Harmon was caught up in the Millerite movement that expected the Second Coming in the mid-1840s. Greatly disappointed when the Lord didn't show up on schedule, she became "the fragile trance figure of a motley group of ephemeral millenarians," Butler writes. Braving sexist opposition, marital problems, financial crises, ill health, and widowhood, she would eventually "be transformed into the full-fledged, incredibly forceful prophet of a viable and durable church," a woman whose "lifetime of longing for another world placed its indelible and historic mark on this world."

If White had stuck to preaching and writing, evangelicals might have accepted Adventists as eccentric fellow travelers. But White claimed to have visions directly from God. This seems odder today than it did in her era. White's religious experience, writes Ann Taves, was "shaped by the visionary culture of shouting Methodism," a prominent hyper-emotional stream of early American revivalism. The challenge for White and her followers was to distinguish her experiences from those of other seers, whose visions, White asserted, were neither God-inspired (as religious visionaries claimed) nor due to natural phenomena (as mesmerists believed): they were satanic deceptions aimed at destroying faith in Christ. White did not deal with "false prophets" gently: Ronald Graybill reports that, "confronted by a young woman she believed was having a 'false vision,' she recommended getting 'a pitcher of cold water, good cold water' and throwing it 'right in her face.' "

Many of White's visions concerned the behavior of individual Adventists, families, or congregations. After having such a vision, White would write a letter to the offender(s), "expressing her convictions and persuading [them] to change their attitudes and habits," writes Graeme Sharrock. These letters, called "testimonies," were widely distributed, and many were eventually published. This did not necessarily please their original recipients. Her late-1860s spate of testimonies against "solitary vice," for example—some of which named names—may have won her more readers than friends.

Other visions helped to set directions the SDA church would take. Ronald Numbers and Rennie B. Schoepflin describe White's 1863 vision about health: "God showed the thirty-five-year-old prophetess the evils of medicinal drugs, alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee, meat, spices, fashionable dress, and sex and the benefits of a twice-a-day vegetarian diet, internal and external use of water, fresh air, exercise, and a generally abstemious life style." Health reform, medical missionary work, hospital building, and education for the health professions all have become hallmarks of SDA practice.

White's enduring influence depends primarily on her writing. The author of 26 books—one of which, Steps to Christ, has sold twice as many copies as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—she also wrote pamphlets, articles, and letters totaling some 70,000 typed pages. Theology was not her strong point, but everything she spoke or wrote was built on her conviction that Jesus would soon return. The faithful would then spend 1,000 years in heaven before coming back to a re-created earthly paradise. For White, as for John Milton, both paradise lost and paradise restored were literal. The Genesis creation story was to be read as history—six 24-hour days of work followed by one 24-hour day of rest. To understand the story any other way, she believed, was to weaken the argument for seventh-day Sabbath observance. Evolution was a lie promulgated by infidels; Noah's flood, not geological ages, explained the fossil record. If this sounds familiar, it's because there's a direct line from White's teaching to that of an early 20th-century SDA convert, George McCready Price, and from him to the "creation scientists" that still exist today—though few of them worship on Saturday.

Much of White's writing was heavily edited, ghosted, or borrowed without attribution. White, whose education ended at third grade, did not see this as a problem. Some of her contemporaries did. But in the early 20th century, Adventism, like much of the rest of conservative Christianity, was moving toward fundamentalism, and Adventist leaders who believed that White's words were practically inerrant managed to suppress the critics' objections. From the 1930s to the 1970s, "the 'practical inerrancy' perspective rose to a position of orthodoxy," say SDA professors Paul McGraw and Gilbert Valentine. And then in the 1970s an assortment of Adventist writers uncovered the suppressed documents, researched White's sources, and argued that her theology was faulty. All hell broke loose.

My daughters abandoned Sabbath school in the late 1970s, and our family began attending an Episcopal church in 1981. We avoided most of the acrimony briefly described in the last chapters of Ellen Harmon White. I can't evaluate McGraw and Valentine's assertion that "early twenty-first-century Adventists appeared little concerned about her words at all," though they are surely right in noting that "divergent perspectives on the role and authority of the Ellen White writings continue to compete in the church." While many SDAs, like the contributors to this book, now hold a nuanced view of their church's prophet, some of the church's top administrators are actively promoting a 1950s-style fundamentalism. Personally, I like George Bernard Shaw's description of another visionary, Joan of Arc:

There are people in the world whose imagination is so vivid that when they have an idea it comes to them as an audible voice, sometimes uttered by a visual figure. … The test of sanity is not the normality of the method but the reasonableness of the discovery … . But she was none the less an able leader of men for imagining her ideas in this way.

Whatever else she may have been, Ellen Harmon White was "an able leader of men" who deserves to be more widely known. This book is a welcome step in that direction.

LaVonne Neff, recently transplanted to Baltimore, blogs at livelydust.blogspot.com.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I have never attended a séance, but from what I have read they seem to consist largely of interrogating the deceased. As this is odd on so many more obvious levels, it has never before struck me that it is also a strange (if not downright rude) way to go about having a conversation. A true dialogue with the dead would surely include these knowledgeable souls initiating topics for discussion rather than just responding to our agenda.

David Gange never explicitly explains the title of his book, nor does he develop the metaphor of dialogues with dead. Nevertheless, his splendid cultural history of British Egyptology is an account of a century of people studying the land of the pharaohs in order to get answers to the questions that interested them rather than to find out what mattered to ancient Egyptians.

And what the Victorians wanted to know was what those who had dwelt beside the Nile long ago had to say about the Bible. A lazy assumption of secularization has infused accounts of modern history, making people imagine that a religious focus was decreasing as the 19th century progressed. Like the plagues of Egypt, however, it actually intensified at the end. Thus the Egyptology of the 1880s and 1890s was significantly more preoccupied with scriptural connections than was that of mid-century.

I have always admired the clever way that Jeanette Winterson used the first eight books of the Old Testament as the chapter titles in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Similarly, Gange's five well-researched chapters are named after the chronology of ancient Egypt, complete with first and second intermediate periods. The tour de force chapter that dramatically and convincingly overturns the existing narrative is thus "The Middle Kingdom: Orthodox Egypt, 1880-1900."

In the 1840s, religious iconoclasts were smirkingly confident that Egyptology would debunk orthodox Christianity. Higher critics assumed that findings would strengthen their case against a traditional reading of the Bible. Unitarians expected soon to be able to demonstrate that the doctrine of the Trinity was borrowed from Egyptian paganism. Freethinking polemicists improved on the hint: "Bind it around thy neck, write it upon the tablet of thy heart: Everything of Christianity is of Egyptian origin." Religious conservatives glanced at the pyramids nervously.

But the tide turned, and the new expectation in the last quarter of the century was that ancient authors would be proved accurate—whether it be Homer, Herodotus, or Hosea. The Assyriologist George Smith translated some tablets held by the British Museum which turned out to contain part of a Babylonian account of a Great Deluge. Like the New York Herald sending Stanley to find Livingstone, in 1872 the Daily Telegraph commissioned Smith to go dig around in the Middle East and come back with the rest of the story. He went to the site of ancient Nineveh and uncovered more of this biblically resonant flood narrative after just one week of fieldwork!

This stupendous success created a sanguine generation which hoped to decide what scriptural proofs it wanted most and just go off and get them like they were ordering takeaway. Let's find Joseph's mummy next! The Egypt Exploration Fund was founded in 1882. Its first task was to discover the route of the Exodus—which it promptly did to its own satisfaction.

In the following year, digging began at what was identified as the site of Pithom, a city which the Hebrew slaves were forced to build (Ex. 1:11). Thrillingly, the structure uncovered was made of more than one type of brick; the top portion—believe it or not—of bricks that did not use straw. The novelist and Egyptologist Amelia Edwards enthused: "We see the bricks which they had to make, and did make, without straw, while their hands were bleeding and their hearts were breaking. Shakespeare, in one of his most familiar passages, tells us of 'sermons in stone'; but here we have a sermon in bricks."

The Egypt Exploration Fund, apparently imagining Tudor masonry, wanted 1,000 bricks sent back as sacred-relic mementos for its donors, but shipping these large, heavy objects in any significant quantity was impracticable—and probably only the most pious of Victorians would really have wanted a huge, disintegrating hunk of mud monopolizing the surface of their mahogany desk.

While such over-reaching is good for a laugh, Gange is careful to observe that the biblical associations were often being made by the best archaeologists and linguists—and in reasonably responsible ways. Flinders Petrie, "indisputably the most significant figure in the history of British Egyptology," first became interested in ancient Egypt through listening to the sermons of his Plymouth Brethren father.

Even the most gifted scholars were so immersed in the scriptures that they often saw the Bible everywhere they looked. There was a serious theory that the Great Sphinx at Giza was a monument to Noah. It was decided that the pharaoh Akhenaten wrote the original version of Psalm 104. Petrie visited an orphanage and his trained eye could not fail to notice that two of the children were Hittites.

A related question was: What is a good Christian to think of Egyptian religion? In the middle of the 19th century, the trend was to emphasize its repulsiveness (a people in such spiritual darkness that they worshipped dogs!) and to use this as an object lesson in divine judgment. As the Victorian age wore on, however, the Egyptians were increasingly enlisted as witnesses to sacred truths. The most optimistic of such observers claimed to have found in the religion of the pharaohs confirmation of the doctrines of the Trinity, the immortality of the human soul, and even the resurrection of the body.

Dialogues with the Dead is an impressive and important scholarly contribution, and part of what makes it so satisfying is Gange's grasp of the fact that the discipline of Egyptology was thoroughly entwined with mass culture. Popular enthusiasm for ancient Egypt was unbounded. When the businessman John Marshall decided to build a new flax mill in Leeds, he had erected an imposing neo-Egyptian structure, the Temple Works. A huge obelisk dubbed Cleopatra's Needle was transported at great expense to adorn London. (Its twin went to New York.) When Knowledge, a weekly journal of popular science, was founded in 1881, its editor understood full well what it would take to grab people's attention. The first issue included "Was Ramases II the pharaoh of the Exodus?", a series which, like a film franchise too popular to end, was stretched out for three months.

Moreover, the meshing of biblical and Egyptological enthusiasms defied any neat boundaries. Religious skeptics of long standing would suddenly be overcome with fascination that a particular scriptural text was being confirmed by archaeology. Conversely, orthodox clergymen would plunge into occult Egyptian rituals. The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor was actually led by an Anglican vicar. The archbishop of Canterbury, E. W. Benson, was so enamored with ancient Egypt that the family cat was named after the god Ra. Primed with such zeal, his daughter, Margaret Benson, had Egyptology and Anglicanism so thoroughly blended together in her head that when she arrived in situ she found herself, in the fullness of her heart, confessing her sins to the Sphinx. But as ever in this story, the zany lies side by side with the substantial: Benson went on to become the first woman to lead an Egyptian excavation.

Many people believed Charles Piazzi Smith—who, indeed, was brilliant—when he claimed that the Great Pyramid was a divine revelation of mathematics. (Part of what the Almighty wished to communicate was that the inch was a sacred rather than merely arbitrary form of measurement. God-fearing Americans who stubbornly resist the metric system might want to look into it.)

Ancient-civilization novels such as H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) became wildly popular. Haggard befriended leading Egyptologists, toured the Nile, and collected antiquities. Not content with such due diligence, he also continued his researches with the aid of spiritualism and finally—leaving no stone unturned, as it were—hallucinogens.

Enthusiastic amateurs set off to see the sites in such numbers that Petrie eventually took to excavating in just his pink underpants as a polite hint that he was not currently taking social calls. On the other hand, the line between amateur and professional was not easily drawn. William Myers was an army officer who spent his boyhood at Eton and was killed in the Boer War. In between, he was stationed in Egypt. The boredom was unbearable. He failed at sketching and, in near despair, attempted the clarinet (it was "harder than I thought"). He was at last saved by developing an interest in antiquities, and his collection, donated to his alma mater, is one of the most impressive private ones in the world.

Looking back in 1903, the clergyman C. H. W. Johns observed how so many finds had played out in the public consciousness: "We seem to have a repetition of an old experience. Something is discovered which is first hailed as a remarkable confirmation of Scripture, then seen to be a serious impeachment of its accuracy, finally known to be purely independent and unconnected."

The last chapter of Dialogues with the Dead, "The New Kingdom," deals with the period after 1900, when the discipline managed to insist that it needed to listen to the distinctive music of the Nile rather than continue to allow Moses to call all the tunes. The longsuffering dead would finally get a chance to natter away about their own preoccupations.

Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton College. His sixth monograph, The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith, is just out from Oxford University Press.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

This is a guest column by William Griffin. He was brought up in Boston, where he acquired 14 years of Latin at such Jesuit institutions as Boston College High School, Boston College, and Weston College. His translations include three volumes by Thomas à Kempis and Augustine's Sermons to the People: Advent, Christmas, New Year's, Epiphany. He and his wife, Emilie, a fellow Latinist, live in Alexandria, Louisiana, with their lively Latin library and their aging, one-eyed Teddy. His favorite books? Winnie Ille Pooh and De Petro Cunicolo.

Fifty-five years ago I met a young woman in Greenwich Village; we'd been attending a playwriting seminar on Monday nights. She was forward; I was backward. She invited me for coffee. She paid before I could. She dropped a quarter into the jukebox and punched "Moon River."

Her handbag was cavernous. A little spelunking by my roving eye, and I saw a book. A very small yellow book. Langenscheidt's Latin Dictionary (454 pages in 6 pt. type). And why do you carry that around? I asked. Who knows when I'll bump into a Vatican diplomat? she replied. She'd had eight years of Latin; I'd had twelve. I proposed to her on the spot. And we've been declining and conjugating ever since.

Who says Latin is dead? Not I. Not she. Not Jürgen Leonhardt, a classical philologist at the University of Tübingen. His book is something of a museum piece but in a good sense, and he is something of a docent in the best sense. He takes the reader on a leisurely stroll from one aula to another. From "Latin as a World Language" to "The Language of the Empire" to "Europe's Latin Millennium" to "World Language without a World" to "Latin Today." It was a wonderful way to spend a rainy afternoon.

Some random impressions from the tour:

"No other dead language continues to exert such influence in the world."

All the writings surviving from ancient Rome "constitute at most 0.01 percent of the total output" of texts in Latin.

"Latin is cropping up in the most unexpected places."

On this last point, Leonhardt adduces evidence from the actress Angelina Jolie, who (so it is reported) has had the Latin phrase quod me nutrit me destruit (what nourishes me also destroys me) tattooed on her lower abdomen. Clearly, scholars will want to delve into that.

Re vera, Latin is a fixed language, not in the neutering sense but in the sense that "several core components remain unchangeable, while other parts continue to evolve as in any other normal language." Later, however, Leonhardt makes this concession: "Treating Latin as if it were a living language is … not a sentimental step into the past but rather the best way to understand what Latin was as a world language and how it worked." Note the "as if."

Heu, heu, that rhetorical move may satisfy the professional Latinists and Latinistas, but I, by the grace of God, am not one of these. I will continue to think of Latin as a living, working language, and I'm not alone in this. Granted, there's only few of us left. But we do enjoy the annual picnic at Vesuvius; rain-check at Etna.

I come by my Latin sine cera. I've edited two volumes (volumes 3 and 4) in a high school Latin series (Harcourt). Here and there a Conventiculum Latinum. An online Latin Word-for-the-Day series. Translation of Latin classics. Business Latin. Etcetera, etcetera, and so forth.

One day I woke up and found that Latin had become my second language. I'd mastered the grammar and syntax, and I had a wordy mammoth of vocabulary. But I don't teach or write or otherwise proclaim the wonderfulness of Latin. I'm more like Chaucer s Clerk of Oxenford, a poor scholar but a faithful one, lugging his library on a faltering nag.

With this meager background I make bold to add four causes of the decline of Latin not mentioned by Professor Leonhardt in his fine volume.

Primo, the dictionary. How can one have a stable language without a stable dictionary? The unabridged English dictionary is one gigantic volume. But the Latin dictionary in my lifetime runs three volumes by different lexicographers and publishers.

Lewis, Short, Freund's A Latin Dictionary. 2,019 pages.

Souter's Glossary of Later Latin to 600 a.d. 454 pages.

Niermeier s Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus. 1,138 pages in bulk, but perhaps that number should be halved, what with it's being a Latin-French/English dictionary.

(I pass over in silence and in pain the recent publication of an expensive two-volume Latin-English dictionary that I can only dream about.)

Why three volumes? Wars and rumors of wars, but I thought lexicographers were above that. But for the reformation, there would be only one dictionary covering Latin from the beginning. A multiplicity of dictionaries is a sign of disintegration.

(If there is a dictionary of modern Latin, I'd welcome hearing about it.)

Altero, Latin is generally a subject for é lite students. But to survive, a language needs middle-class students, thousands and thousands of them.

Tertio, a language that can't be spoken is dead as a doornail. Of course, this statement can be refuted easily, but to what end? In my case all Latin fell into place when I was put into the uncomfortable position of having to speak Latin or starve. My first attempts were humbling, even humiliating. Soon, as with all languages, I caught on and haven't missed a meal since.

Nota bene. When Latin is spoken these days, it's generally in academic surroundings; the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax are Ciceronian. Not that there's anything wrong with that if the occasion is reenactment. Otherwise, speaking like that would be like spouting Shakespeare in Kroger's, aisle 7. Aliis verbis, one's Latin when speaking the language today should be as chatworthy and colloquial as English.

Fourth, when Latin is spoken the accent is generally Italian, which is odd. Wherever English is spoken as the first language, in the U.S. and the U.K., in Nigeria, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, Singapore, or Jamaica, it has a fine, regionally and reasonably intelligible sound. Change English to Latin, and the result is the same.

Pentimento

I can remember my sophom*ore high school Latin and Greek teacher, Fr. Paul Ruttle, leading us through endless recitation of declensions and conjugations. We were his lead soldiers, and he was putting us through our parade drills. He was a wraith of a man. No doubt he smiled many times a day, but his skin was stretched so tight over his skull, no one knew it but he. But he had an aura about him. He was a holy man, the sort I could entrust my soul to, and indeed I did. His influence led me to enter the Jesuits, where I spent eight hard but happy years. One of his witless witticisms has stayed with me still: "On your death bed you'll be reciting conjugations and declensions till you breathe your last."

At the time the remark was made, 1950, it sounded preposterous, but as the decades have flown by, it has become less so. Having recently passed my seventy-ninth birthday, I feel I should put what time I have left to good use. I'd hoped to brush up my Shakespeare, but will probably dust off my Latin instead.

—William Griffin

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.